Dictionary Introduction

We began working on this Revised Chamorro-English dictionary in 2008, as part of a collaborative project to upgrade the documentation of the Chamorro language, funded by the National Science Foundation and headed by Elizabeth D. Rechebei and Sandra Chung. One of the project’s aims was to revise and expand Topping, Ogo, and Dungca’s (1975) Chamorro-English dictionary (University of Hawaii Press), which had been published some thirty-five years before.

It is now more than fifteen years since this dictionary revision project began, and although the work is not yet complete, we are close enough that we are ready to share a version of it with the public. Here, we say what we hope to have achieved, describe the community’s involvement in the revision process, and point out some of the many differences between the revised dictionary and the original 1975 dictionary. We conclude by reflecting on the ways in which this revision is a work in progress.

Why a revised dictionary?
Why did we revise Topping, Ogo, and Dungca’s dictionary, rather than putting together our own dictionary from the ground up? Because we wanted to build on strength. In many ways, the 1975 Chamorro-English dictionary is unique among Chamorro dictionaries. It is the first Chamorro dictionary to be written by native speakers and trained linguists, and the first to use a standard orthography (= a standardized spelling system) for the Chamorro language. It is also, we believe, the first that makes a systematic attempt to use earlier Chamorro dictionaries as sources; to include Chamorro words for flora and fauna, along with their scientific names; and to include Chamorro nicknames (see Topping, Ogo, and Dungca 1975, pp. xiii-xiv and xxvii).

At the same time, we felt that the 1975 dictionary could be improved in some ways. The Chamorro orthography used in the 1975 dictionary did not distinguish between the low front vowel (now spelled a) and the low back vowel (now spelled å). Headwords – that is, the words defined – were classified using unusual parts of speech, such as ‘1’ and ‘2’. Only some dictionary entries included Chamorro sentences illustrating the headword’s usage. Most of the illustrative sentences were quite short. Many entries had no illustrative sentences at all.

The need for revisions has been made more urgent by the decline in the vitality of the Chamorro language. The Chamorro language, has steadily lost ground to English, first in Guam – shortly after the end of World War II – and then in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) – after the transition to Commonwealth status. The Chamorro language is now considered to be endangered. As awareness has grown of the very real possibility that it might become extinct, efforts have increased to maintain, revitalize, and promote it as a central part of Chamorro culture. These developments make it important to document the language as completely as possible, so that the knowledge of today’s fluent native speakers can be preserved for future generations.

The revision process
The NSF project’s initial plans for the dictionary revision called for the revision process to be led by Rita H. Inos as Editor, and to involve Chamorro speakers from all the officially inhabited islands of the Mariana Islands – Guam (Guåhan), Rota (Luta), Saipan, and Tinian. The response from community members in Rota, Saipan, and Tinian was highly enthusiastic. During the first three years of the dictionary revision (2008–2011), more than a hundred people contributed. Most were members of the working groups, which revised the spelling and definitions of the 1975 dictionary entries and added illustrative sentences, and/or members of the thematic groups, which constructed entries for words associated with specific Chamorro cultural practices (see the Acknowledgements). Unfortunately, the community members in Guam who were approached at this initial stage were not able to participate; many of them were already involved in a different community dictionary project, which led to the publication of Aguon, Flores, and Leon Guerrero’s (2009) The official Chamorro-English dictionary / Ufisiåt na diksionårion Chamorro-Engles (Department of Chamorro Affairs, Guam).

Once the dictionary entries were revised, a small group of people entered them, and any entries that had been constructed for new headwords, into an electronic database in the Summer Institute of Linguistics’s (SIL) Toolbox format. This work was facilitated by Cameron Fruit, who served as technical consultant for the dictionary revision project.

In 2009, Dr. Inos passed away. The loss of her charismatic leadership was deeply felt. A team of three editors replaced her – Dr. Elizabeth D. Rechebei, Manuel F. Borja, and Tita A. Hocog – and, assisted by Dr. Chung, have continued the editing process up to the present.

It is fair to say that editing turned out to be a more arduous process than anyone expected. We have found it especially challenging to edit the dictionary entries for headwords that we and the members of the working groups are not familiar with, or which need more information, such as words for types of fish, plants, birds, weather patterns, etc. Many of these Chamorro words have now been replaced with English words. Therefore, more research needs to be done in the future to fully describe them. Many individuals in the Mariana Islands, the CNMI especially, as well as individuals outside the Marianas have helped to verify the definitions of these words, or have contributed entries for headwords not in the 1975 dictionary (see the Acknowledgements). We also received assistance from Guam’s Kumision I Fino’ CHamoru in the verification process.

New to this revision
In many ways, the Revised Chamorro-English dictionary is different enough from the 1975 dictionary that it can be viewed as substantially new.

Almost all of the 9,700 headwords in the 1975 dictionary are also present in the revised dictionary, but many new headwords have been added. The total number of headwords in the revised dictionary database is well over 10,500, as of the writing of this introduction. The new headwords are quite varied; some are very frequent words (e.g. piót ‘especially’, tamålis gisu ‘type of corn tamale, one half spicy and the other half plain’), while others are highly specialized words (e.g. Pappan Timik ‘Gamma Aquilae (a star in the constellation of Aquila)’). There was some debate among community members in the initial stages of the project about whether headwords viewed as taboo or offensive should be kept or deleted. The ultimate decision was to keep them, with the idea that they could be deleted from any children’s dictionary that may be created from the database.

The Chamorro language has two standard orthographies, one currently the official Chamorro orthography in Guam and the other, in the CNMI (see Chung 2020, Chapter 29). All headwords in the revised dictionary are spelled in the official Chamorro orthography adopted by the CNMI in 2010. This orthography is guided by the principle ‘one sound, one spelling’ – that is, words are spelled as they sound. For instance, the Chamorro words for ‘feather’, ‘put’, and ‘you (dual or plural)’ all end with the sound /u/. In the revised dictionary, these words are all spelled with a final u: pulu ‘feather’, po’lu ‘put’, and hamyu ‘you (dual or plural)’. (In contrast, they are spelled pulu, po’lo, and hamyo in the 1975 dictionary.)

Readers should be aware of two exceptions to the ‘one sound, one spelling’ principle that are adopted here. First, just as in the CNMI’s official orthography, the symbol h is used both for the sound /h/ (e.g. in åhu ‘young coconut meat cooked with water, sugar, and starch’) and to separate two adjacent vowels that are in different syllables (e.g. in diha ‘day’); in the second use, h is not pronounced. Second, words that have a doubled (geminate) consonant are spelled with the doubled consonant even in forms which, when pronounced, would usually have the doubled consonant reduced to a single consonant. For instance, påtti ‘part, portion’, which contains a doubled t, is spelled with tt in the revised dictionary, even in the form pattek-ku ‘my part’, in which the geminate /tt/ would usually be pronounced as /t/. This spelling convention was adopted to make it easier for dictionary users to look up words in the illustrative sentences that they might not be familiar with.

All headwords in the revised dictionary are classified with traditional parts of speech, such as noun (n.), adjective (adj.), intransitive verb (vi.), transitive verb (vt.), preposition (prep.), and so on. See the Abbreviations for the list of parts of speech used.
Most importantly, almost all entries in the revised dictionary include two or three Chamorro sentences illustrating the headword’s usage. These illustrative sentences are new – created by the working groups and the editors, not carried over from the 1975 dictionary. They vary in length and complexity, are culturally appropriate, and are intended to show how the headword can be used in different types of sentences. In and of themselves, they represent a significant contribution to the documentation of the Chamorro language.

Some other ways in which the revised dictionary differs from the 1975 dictionary are as follows:

The definitions of some headwords have been expanded, with new meanings added. The definitions of other headwords have been streamlined or made more accurate.

An attempt has been made to identify headwords borrowed from Spanish, Japanese, or English, and provide their source word in the donor language.

Attempts have also been made to systematically check the scientific names for flora and fauna and, when necessary, update them.

A new English-Chamorro finder list, based on the revised dictionary database, will be provided. To make this finder list easier to use, the English words listed are disambiguated, so that ‘can (container)’, for instance, is listed separately from ‘can (possible)’.

A work in progress
The revised dictionary is clearly a work in progress. As of this moment, the editors continue their work of revising dictionary entries, adding new entries, and checking for consistency across entries. There are many words unfamiliar to the editors and the working groups whose meanings still need to be verified. Another way in which the revised dictionary is not complete is that it does not attempt to systematically incorporate material from other Chamorro dictionaries which were published after 2000 and/or are currently available online. Bringing all this material together in a consistent format remains a hope for the future.

In our view, putting a timestamp on this revised dictionary would not reflect its fundamental purpose, which is to create a living document whose updating, expansion, improvement, revision, and renewal will contribute to the reinvigoration of the Chamorro language.

Further information
The digital files for Topping, Ogo, and Dungca (1975), electronic versions of the revised dictionary entries originally submitted by participants in the dictionary revision, and the unedited dictionary database as of 2016 are archived at PARADISEC as collection CHA1 (https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/CHA1/).

The dictionary revision process is described further in Chung and Rechebei (2014), and efforts to revitalize the Chamorro language are surveyed in Rechebei and Chung (2018).

The revised dictionary is intended to be used together with the Chamorro grammar (Chung 2020), which draws much of its material from the unedited dictionary database.

References
Aguon, Katherine B., Teresita C. Flores, and Lourdes T. Leon Guerrero. 2009. The official Chamorro-English dictionary / Ufisiåt na diksionårion Chamorro-Engles. Department of Chamorro Affairs, Guam.
Chung, Sandra. 2020. Chamorro grammar. eScholarship. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sx7w4h5
Chung, Sandra and Elizabeth D. Rechebei. 2014. ‘Community engagement in the Revised Chamorro-English dictionary.’ Dictionaries 35: 308–317.
Rechebei, Elizabeth D. and Sandra Chung. 2018. ‘Chamorro language revitalization in the CNMI and Guam.’ In Cultural heritage care and management: Theory and practice, ed. Cecilia L. Salvatore, pp. 83–93. Rowman & Littlefield.
Topping, Donald M., Pedro M. Ogo, and Bernadita C. Dungca. 1975. Chamorro-English dictionary. University of Hawaii Press.